Abstract
The interaction between light and materials is key to physically-based realistic rendering. However, it is also complex to analyze, especially when the materials contain a large number of details and thus exhibit “glinty” visual effects. Recent methods of producing glinty appearance are expected to be important in next-generation computer graphics. We provide here a comprehensive survey on recent glinty appearance rendering. We start with a definition of glinty appearance based on microfacet theory, and then summarize research works in terms of representation and practical rendering. We have implemented typical methods using our unified platform and compare them in terms of visual effects, rendering speed, and memory consumption. Finally, we briefly discuss limitations and future research directions. We hope our analysis, implementations, and comparisons will provide insight for readers hoping to choose suitable methods for applications, or carry out research.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant No. 2020YFB1708900, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61872223, and the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. ZR2020LZH016.
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Junqiu Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate at Shandong University, China, working under the supervision of Prof. Xiangxu Meng. Her research is in physically-based rendering, real-time ray tracing, and realistic appearance modeling.
Sizhe Zhao is a master student at Shandong University. He received his bachelor degree from the School of Energy and Power Engineering at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2021. His research interest is in computer graphics.
Yanning Xu is an associate professor in the School of Software, Shandong University. He received his Ph.D. degree from Shandong University in 2006. His research interests include photorealistic rendering and high performance rendering.
Xiangxu Meng is a professor in the School of Software, Shandong University. He obtained his Ph D degree from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 1998. His research covers industrial design, product design, digital media, software services and other applications, human-computer interaction, computer graphics theory and methods, virtual reality and virtual prototyping, grid computing and service computing, manufacturing of information technology, and other areas of theoretical research and system development.
Lu Wang is a professor in the School of Software, Shandong University. She received her Ph.D. degree from Shandong University in 2009. Her research interests include photorealistic rendering and high performance rendering.
Ling-Qi Yan is an assistant professor of computer science at UC Santa Barbara, co-director of the MIRAGE Lab, and affiliated faculty in the Four Eyes Lab. Before that, he received his doctoral degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley and obtained his bachelor degree in computer science from Tsinghua University. His research interests include physically-based rendering, realtime ray tracing, and realistic appearance modeling.
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Zhu, J., Zhao, S., Xu, Y. et al. Recent advances in glinty appearance rendering. Comp. Visual Media 8, 535–552 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-022-0280-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-022-0280-x